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Tales of Nigerian escapees add to worries about captives

Six of the Nigerian schoolgirls who managed to escape after being kidnapped by Boko Haram insurgents in April. More than 260 are still missing. (ADAM NOSSITER / The New York Times)

By Adam NossiterThe New York Times

Thu., May 15, 2014

MAIDUGURI, NIGERIA—Among the lucky ones, there are pensive smiles but not much laughter.

When the militants came to their school, the men shouted “Allahu akbar!” and announced, “We are Boko Haram,” firing their rifles and threatening casually to kill the teenage girls studying there.

“They said: ‘If you want to die, sit down here. We will kill you. If you don’t want to die, you will enter the trucks,’” remembered Kuma Ishaku, a soft-spoken 18-year-old in a bright white blouse with silver sparkles.

On Wednesday, President Goodluck Jonathan rejected Boko Haram’s demand that he free the group’s imprisoned members in exchange for the girls, according to a British minister who met with him.

Although Nigeria has mounted an aggressive campaign against Boko Haram, often killing civilians in the process, it has been unable to stop the group from attacking schools, towns and even the capital.

Some of the schoolgirls who escaped jumped from the trucks taking them through the bush, trying to persuade reluctant classmates to follow them. Others slipped away from the Islamists’ camp while their captors were distracted. The teenage girls wandered directionless in the thick semi-desert scrub before kind strangers took them back to their village.

“Yes, yes, I ran into the bush,” said Joy Bishara, a tall 18-year-old in a brown T-shirt with “Ice Box” on the front.

She jumped from one of the trucks as it slowed down.

“I don’t know where I am going,” Bishara said, recalling her hasty reasoning that night. “I think they will kill me. They were telling us, ‘We will kill you.’”

Six of the girls who escaped came up to Maiduguri this week to watch the Boko Haram video showing dozens of their captured schoolmates. Well over 70 of the girls on screen have been identified, the governor says, but for the ones who escaped, seeing their friends shrouded in the austere black and grey head scarves and robes the militants imposed was deeply unsettling.

“When we saw them in the movie, we started crying,” said Godiya Simon, 17, who escaped from the Boko Haram camp.

Outside a villa here, three of the girls quietly told their stories of escape. The girls, dressed in vivid shades of green, blue, red and orange — a sharp contrast to the Islamists’ black — brushed off suggestions of exceptional courage.

“We woke up and we saw people in military uniforms,” said Ishaku, who, like many of the students, had come in from an outlying area and was sleeping at the school that night, April 14, when she heard the sound of gunfire.

“We thought they were army men,” she said. “They were telling us, ‘Come, come. We are army.’”

The girls were told to gather in one spot, but Ishaku knew something was wrong when the men began barking: “Where do you keep your food? Where is your staff room?”

The men spoke Kanuri, the language of the dominant ethnic group of the Muslims of Maiduguri. Most of the Chibok residents are Christians of a small minority group who speak Kibaku, another of Nigeria’s myriad languages.

“They told us: ‘We are Boko Haram. We will burn your school. You shall not do school again,’” Bishara said. “’You shall do Islamic school.’ And they were shouting, ‘Allahu akbar!’” — “God is great!”

The trucks were waiting, Ishaku recalled. “They said: ‘Now you will know who we are. We will take you to our place.’ We were frightened.”

Crying, the girls boarded the trucks. Crammed in with whatever provisions the Islamists had been able to seize from the now burned-down school, many of the girls gave themselves over to tears and despair. But Ishaku noticed a window of opportunity as the truck made its way through the dense scrubby bush, called the Sambisa forest, that abuts Chibok.

The pickup full of armed men that was bringing up the rear, guarding the convoy, was straggling behind.

Ishaku jumped from the moving truck and ran through the underbrush, sufferings scrapes and bruises along the way but eventually reaching safety.

Those who stayed endured a bumpy, fearful 12-hour journey on the crammed trucks. When they reached the Boko Haram camp in the forest around noon on April 15, Simon was among those ordered to cook for the men.

Initially, at least, “they were not rough with us,” she said. But when she pleaded with them to allow her to go into the bush to relieve herself, they refused, three times.

Finally, while the men were busy eating, she and three others made a run for it. They kept running until they reached the house of a herdsman of the Fulani ethnic group.

“They gave us food,” Simon said. “They asked us to stay with them.”

The next day, the village head was informed, and the four girls were driven back to Chibok.

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